Business Musings: Tempest in a Bestseller List

There’s less reason to game the Times list now, however. The list has bifurcated so much that you can climb the top of one of the many lists with sales that my first novel (which didn’t even sniff at the list) blew out of the water in its first week twenty-five years ago. Big publishers don’t make a lot of money on 5,000 copies. Indies do, compared to expenses. But big publishers do not.

So, the amount of work that someone had put into placing Sarem’s book on the bestseller list made no sense to me at all. Where was the profit here? What was the point? Bragging rights are nice, but unless you have money to burn, ordering 18,000 copies of your own book is pretty expensive.

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The Business Rusch: Dreams and Bestsellers

Because of this blog, I see a lot of publishing contracts. People want advice on certain clauses. I tell folks that I can’t give legal advice because I’m not a lawyer, but I will look at the contract and tell them if they need to hire a lawyer to negotiate it. Most of the time (99.9% of the time), they need that lawyer, and I […]

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The Business Rusch: Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics

The Business Rusch: Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics Kristine Kathryn Rusch The quote in my title comes from Mark Twain’s autobiography.  Twain said: “Figures often beguile me, particularly when I have the arranging of them myself; in which case the remark attributed to Disraeli would often apply with justice and force: “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies and statistics.” The problem with […]

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The Business Rusch: Slush Pile Truths

The Business Rusch: Slush Pile Truths Kristine Kathryn Rusch Every week, people send me links to various publishing articles/blogs I might not have seen.  I cherish those links.  I don’t see everything, and when I’m under severe deadline, like I have been since March, I have no time to ferret out information unrelated to the current project. But last week, at least twenty people (maybe […]

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The Business Rusch: Modern Writer Survival Skills (Changing Times Part 18)

The Business Rusch: Modern Writer Survival Skills (Changing Times Part Eighteen) Kristine Kathryn Rusch I was going to title this installment “Beginning Writers Part Three,” but I think that title is too exclusive. Because all writers are going to need the skill sets I’m going to describe below to get through these changes in publishing. My crystal ball is refusing to tell me whether or […]

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The Business Rusch: Rapid Change (Changing Times Part Twelve)

The Business Rusch: Rapid Change (Changing Times Part Twelve) Kristine Kathryn Rusch Back when I wrote my first post on the changing times in publishing in October, I said that changes were happening so quickly that I knew some of what I wrote at the beginning of the series might not be relevant at the end of it.  While the events that have happened in […]

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